Posted
by
kdawson
on Saturday March 14, 2009 @11:10PM
from the never-saw-that-you-did-painting-need dept.

Reader Hugh Pickens sends in news from the NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 400-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death. No existing portrait, that most experts consider to be genuine, was captured during Shakespeare's lifetime. "It shows Shakespeare as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by previous engravings, busts and portraits. 'His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty,' said a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford. The portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, 'Searching for Shakespeare,' and realized that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in his family's art collection since the mid-18th century, with the family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare. Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s." For balance, the New Yorker disputes some of the claims in the NYTimes account, and for good measure tosses in another purported Shakespeare portrait from life, this one discovered 3 years ago in Canada.

Yeah I found the notion of "balance" coming from kdawson to be pretty hilarious too. Sure, every news/opinion outlet is gonna have its biases, but Slashdot always has to have that one editor who's on just a bit more of a crusade than the others.

Heh... when last I visited a museum, I was amazed by the lifelike realism of paintings of all sorts from ca. 1600. Some are not readily distinguishable from a photograph. In fact, some are visually akin to the "3-D photography" used as film backdrops, with just a strong an illusion of being 3D.

More than you know. One of the original "Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare" proponents was the unfortunately-named J. Thomas Looney*, who said Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote everything, despite the inconvenient fact that de Vere died about nine years before Shakespeare's last recorded play was written.

Hmm, I'll refrain from saying "whoosh", as it was rather indirect.
However, I was under the impression that the name "Looney" was pronounced "loony". At least, I knew a fellow (a PhD) with that name and pronunciation. Perhaps it was different in Tudor times.
Anyway, the loony theories abound, however they are pronounced.

who said Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote everything, despite the inconvenient fact that de Vere died about nine years before Shakespeare's last recorded play was written.

Hmmm... as you might know, the dates of composition for Shakespeare's plays are somewhat in dispute (including, of course, "The Tempest", conventionally dated six or seven years after Oxford died in 1604). And if Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon's died in 1616, how was he "Our ever-living poet" (i.e. dead) in 1609?

Personally, though, I'm a Marlovian -- any theory that involves a secret agent writing plays in his spare time, faking his own death to escape execution, and then writing plays of Shakespeare

I've read somewhere that Shakespeare is the surname that Bacon used in literary works. That explains the insights that Shakespeare had with the ruling class and why theres so little info about "Shakespeare" in the crown registries.

1) There's probably more information than we know about. These registries are not the most legible things in the world, and they're not organized particularly well. Honestly they sound like about the worst thing ever to try to decipher.

2) We know a great deal about Shakespeare compared to almost any other playwright from the time.

I hesitate to recommend Bill Bryson's work on the subject. He seems to be a popular author, but I don't particul

Whatever the end result is on the authenticity of either of these portraits, it seems every portrait shares the basic physical traits that we collectively think of as "Shakespeare". Moreover, from what I can tell they seem to be in line with his bust in Holy Trinity Church which was erected not terribly long after his death. It seems to me that if any of these portraits/busts/etc. had been far from the mark, there would have been some sort of protest from the people who knew him when he was alive (or commissioned the work).
In the end, we will never know exactly what he looks like, but we do have a pretty good idea.

Your quote made me realize that it has now been many years since I have trusted the realism of any photos. Aside from photos that I remember from the days before shopping, I know that I will never have any idea of exactly how anyone looks.

Whatever the end result is on the authenticity of either of these portraits, it seems every portrait shares the basic physical traits that we collectively think of as "Shakespeare".

Except that the argument for this portrait being genuine is simply that the others are copies of it! So of course they all look alike! (for example, the painting that brought this most recent discovery to light was the Janssen portrait of Shakespeare, which is accepted to be an Elizabethan portrait of an unknown sitter deliberately doctored about a hundred years after it was painted to look more like Shakespeare (see this article [folger.edu] by the curator of the Folger library...)

Shakespeare, Makespeare. Just another bunch of Clichés strung together.

True and untrue, most of them have morphed into something that is more recognizable by today's standards.... for mine own part, it was Greek to me.
-- The Tragedy of Julius Caesar Act I, Scene 2Has changed to:It's all Greek to me

And

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
-- Hamlet Act 1, scene 4Has changed to:Something Is R

Right now the summary reads: "...NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 500-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death."

If the portrait is 500 years old, and it was painted 6 years before his death, I believe I'm being told that Shakespeare died in AD 2009 - 500 + 6 = 1515. This page [shakespeare-online.com] says that Shakespeare was born 1564. How could Shakespeare have died before he was born? Even if this is true though, and he lived his entire life and wrote all his works while in his mother's womb and died in there in 1515, how could his corpse remain in there for some 49 years when he was still-born? And besides this, how did he develop bodily and mentally in utero such that he was able to lead a life as he did? How did he compose and direct and act? And then how did the artist figure what Shakespeare looked like? Is that the news I'm missing here? Did they have some sort of ultra-sound technology in 1509 and we've just re-discovered this now?

Good thing I didn't put them in brackets then, because then I would have calculated the year which is six years before the painting was made, and not the year of his death, which is what I was so facetiously looking for.;-)

If the portrait is 500 years old, and it was painted 6 years before his death, I believe I'm being told that Shakespeare died in AD 2009 - 500 + 6 = 1515. This page [shakespeare-online.com] says that Shakespeare was born 1564. How could Shakespeare have died before he was born?

You believe it's the year 2009, when in fact it's closer to 2109. I can't tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don't know...

An elaborate fake perhaps, but still a fake. Yes, the frame is made from trees from the period but the only difference between the canvas and existing paintings is that this time the man has a beard and features painted in a different light.

There once was an art dealer who occasionally received pieces from the great master, Picasso. Of course, even in that day there was a great market for fake art, and Picasso had a relatively easy style to duplicate. So the dealer would take some of the paintings he was not sure about to the master and say, "Master, did you paint this?" and Picasso would say one way or another, most often that the painting was fake.

> Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s."

Big deal. Go find any church being torn down and you can find really old timbers, pews, rafters, tables, etc.

However, Eric Phelps, author of Vatican Assassins, would insist that this is not the 'Rosicrucian mask' of the Baconian's but that the Spear shaker's true identity was that of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

It is kind of funny when people play the game of trying to figure out whether famous people from hundreds of years ago were gay. Isaac Newton is another good example. In that era, they would put a man to death if he was caught having sex with another man, so there was a heck of a strong incentive to hide it, and that's why we're unlikely to ever know for sure. There's also the whole issue of whether it makes sense to apply a modern term like "gay." Some men today who consider themselves gay believe that it'

and those with a vested interested (the proclaimer of this discovery is the "Chairman of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust"), Shakespeare's identity itself continues to be hotly debated because there is precious little _real_ evidence for the traditional candidate. (Harpers Magazine had a good full-length feature interviewing proponents of different theories ten years ago, and AFAIK none of them have changed their minds since then.) If, like me, you are one of those poor individuals believing the evidence of

Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s.

Why do you have to mix two different measurement systems to the confusion of the readers? Why give dates as both 16th century (meaning the 1500s) and 1600s (meaning the 17th century) in the same d@mn sentence? Pick one method and stick with it!

He's writing a/. post, not a technical spec. If you read history books for long enough you'll soon get bored reading the same thing over and over again. Sounds like you need to hang with Mr Cowper: "variety is the spice of life", after all.;-)